This lecture, entitled Psychoanalysis and Socialism: A Tale of Two Developments,” was delivered on October 13, 2010 at University College London. It was the inaugural Freud Lecture for the Psychoanalysis Unit at UCL. The event was chaired by Juliet Mitchell
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl
CIVILIZATION AND ITS DREAM OF CONTENTMENT:
REFLECTIONS ON THE UNITY OF HUMANKIND
Background: The editors of the journal Psychoanalytic Inquiry asked me for a contribution to an issue they were preparing for 2010. They were asking a number of psychoanalysts to answer this question: If you were writing Civilization and Its Discontents today, what would you write? At first, I thought answering would require a book, or two –one about Freud’s 1930 text and one about what I think of “civilization” today, preceded by a long excursion on the many meanings of “civilization.” But finally I decided to go ahead, and just live with the fact that an essay –this essay—would leave so many things unsaid, so many domains unexplored, so many qualifications unspoken. Many of the roads not taken will be taken on this blog later.
WHY PSYCHOANALYSIS HAS NO HISTORY
March 18, 2008 Gardiner Lecture, Yale; September, British Psychoanalytical Society lecture
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and Murray Schwartz
No one who is concerned with psychoanalysis as a theory, a practice, and a cluster of local, regional, and international educational and scientific institutions would dispute that psychoanalysis is, today, in a profound crisis. The most obvious symptom of this crisis is comparable to the symptom most studied by contemporary psychoanalytic investigators of trauma, that is, dissociative fragmentation, loss of identity. There are now many versions of psychoanalytic theory; practitioners with the most diverse sorts of training perform the “talking cure” in the most diverse ways; and many of psychoanalysis’s institutions are unable to integrate themselves or operate as communities even after intensely discussing everything about themselves, starting with “what is psychoanalysis?” Psychoanalysis is also in a critical relationship with the diverse societies and cultures world-wide where its work is performed and where it competes with other mental health specialties for patients, for resources, for scientific status and control of disciplinary boundaries, and for recognition of its particular qualities and appreciation of its illustrious past, when it grew from a marginal, revolutionary theory and treatment into a main source of all modern mental health specialties. As with individual traumatic experiences, working through the dilemmas of contemporary psychoanalysis is a slow and complex process, mixing advances, retreats, and iatrogenic effects as the doctors try self-doctoring and doctoring of their field.
THE TRAUMA OF LOST LOVE IN PSYCHOANALYSIS
Background: This essay was requested for a forthcoming collection of essays on Freud’s text Beyond the Pleasure Principle (edited by M.K.O’Niell and S. Ahktar for New Library of Psychoanalysis, London, 2010). It continues a theme that I have written about a number of times since the 2000 publication of Cherishment A Psychology of the Heart (co-authored with Faith Bethelard), namely, that psychoanalysis after Freud developed without a concept Freud himself once formulated and then almost abandoned. That is the concept of “ego instincts,” instincts for satisfying basic provisioning needs and needs for love and relationship. It is the instinct for sociability and for living together with others in a polis recognized by Aristotle as the essential human instinct. Lacking this concept, it has been difficult for psychoanalysts to develop socio-political theories on any other grounds than those Freud bequeathed in Beyond the Pleasure Principle.
This essay was first delivered as a lecture to the Center for Modern Psychoanalysis in New York, December, 2008. It will be published in the Center’s journal Modern Psychoanalysis, Spring 2010. I first explore how women have been represented in psychoanalytic thought, then discuss the development of second- and third-wave feminism, considering how a plurality of women’s movements emerged, worldwide,which represent women quite differently. The essay concludes with some thoughts on how third-wave feminism’s representations of women might inform psychoanalysis.
Remarks for October 18, 2008 conference on Prejudice, William Alanson White/Sullivan Society, New York; adapted for Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine scientific session, November 2, 2010 and Chicago Psychoanalytic Society, November 22, 2010 ; published in a fuller version in Contemporary Psychoanalysis, vol. 45 (2009).
I’d like to share a bit of this work with you today to show you what can come from working with a hypothesis that there are three forms of prejudice against children, and that those forms are similar to the narcissistic, obsessional and hysterical forms that can be seen playing out in prejudices against adults in other target groups –women, Jews and other “middelman minority” groups embedded in others’ economies, people of color and of “lower class.”
